Dialogues around the Pot (‘Diálogos a la Olla’) were initiated in 2023 in the peri-urban neighbourhood of Las Moras in the Peruvian Andes. These dialogues were a collaboration between the women behind two community kitchens and Alsakuy Agroecológica, an agroecological migrant youth organisation. Through a process of articulation, training and collective action, the Dialogues have resulted in the strengthening of food sovereignty, the recovery of community ties and the dignifying of life for local people.
Throughout millennia, women have sustained and defended care work and the reproduction of community life. However, these forms of labour have been systematically invisibilised and stripped of their productive value by the patriarchal and capitalist order. In this article we analyse the lived, felt and observed experience of the grassroots organising led by women involved in the Dialogues around the Pot. This agroecological and food-based process is an attempt to answer the question of how we can produce and reproduce life when the modern colonial system has fragmented our relationships with the land and weakened the community ties that have historically sustained us.
Drawing on a methodology of Militant Action Research (MAR) articulated through Popular Education, the process accompanied the organising of two community kitchens, Leoncio Prado and Las Delicias, composed mainly of migrant women, together with the organisation Alsakuy Agroecológica, which is primarily made up of youth and whose role was to provide formative accompaniment throughout the process.
We learned that in contexts of urban precariousness, practices of care, food self-management and political education can be configured as strategies for defending and reproducing life. Agroecology, when understood as a political-territorial project, becomes intertwined with food sovereignty, community organisation and the struggle for access to water.
The territory: migration and peri-urbanity
The Dialogues around the Pot took place in a valley in Huánuco in the central Andes, approximately 1,900 metres above sea level. This valley is surrounded by three large jirkas (sacred mountains) and criss-crossed by streams and micro-watersheds. Although historically these mountains had greater vegetation cover, that has been reduced due to unchecked urban expansion.
Some 30 years ago, numerous migrant families from highland Andean and Amazonian areas of the region settled in the Las Moras micro-watershed on Rondos Mountain. Today, there are more than 15 peri-urban settlements here that face severe shortages in basic services, particularly continuous access to drinking water and electricity.
Despite these conditions, communities have reconfigured the territory, building ways of life that oscillate between the rural and the urban, thereby shaping the city’s current peri-urban character.
Community kitchens: resistance and self-management
Although the formal process to create the Dialogues around the Pot began in 2023, the practices that sustain them draw on memories, knowledge and previous experiences of community care and buen vivir. In this area, community kitchens function as grassroots food organisations in precarious neighbourhoods, feeding between 80 and 100 people daily – mainly single mothers, children and elderly people.
Community kitchens first emerged in the 1970s in Lima as a response to economic crisis and were massively reactivated in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2021, after collective struggles, the Community Kitchens Law was passed, establishing food provision by local municipalities. However, the subsidy – approximately 0.075 USD per portion – is insufficient to guarantee dignified and healthy food.
Only around 20% of the food for these community kitchens stems from municipal contributions; the rest is self-managed through sales and local networks. Approximately 70% of the ingredients are generated by local family farming, with only about 10% composed of animal protein.
The migrant mothers in the community kitchens hold important knowledge related to land care and food production
The women involved in the kitchens hold important knowledge related to land care and food production; they are mostly migrant mothers and many of them have prior agricultural experience. In everyday neighbourhood life, sustaining lives involves domestic care, shared childcare, community work, collective cooking and informal labour.
In the Andean world, ways of living are structured around relationships of reciprocity, or ayni. Agriculture is a form of co-nurturing between people, seeds, soils and other forms of life. These relationships sustain Allin Kawsay, or buen vivir. When migrating from rural to urban and peri-urban contexts, these principles do not disappear but are transformed.
In contrast, cities organised under patriarchal and capitalist logics erode the relationship with the land and commodify food. Access to dignified food becomes subordinated to income generation, excluding large segments of the population.
Training and articulation
The Dialogues around the Pot emerged at the beginning of the authoritarian regime that has been led by Dina Boluarte since the end of 2022. Amid the most severe food crisis in recent decades, the process was a response to the collective and territorial need to organise, learn and recover ways of building food sovereignty from below. In this context, the young people of Alsakuy Agroecológica approached the women from the grassroots organisations running the community kitchens. From this position, the youth organisation promoted processes of articulation, training and collective action involving the young people and the women from the community organisations.
We adapted our methodological approach based on Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Popular Education, an approach that connects research with transformative action through the active participation of communities in the collective production of knowledge oriented towards social change. This approach recognises non-linearity, horizontal dialogues of knowledge, humility, sentipensar (feeling-thinking), situated critique, identity strengthening and the creation of transformative tools from knowledge rooted in the territory as core principles. As a militant youth organisation, we adapted PAR into a methodology that also supports and strengthens our own work involving organising and articulation.
We also confronted our own limitations in the process, recognising moments in which, even from a critical stance, we reproduced knowledge practices inherited from hegemonic academia. This recognition required a constant exercise of reflection, unlearning and reconfiguration of our practices, in which we opted for tools adapted to the needs, rhythms and desires of participating organisations. This led us to an understanding of the process as Militant Action Research (MAR).
The preliminary phase was recognition and articulation. Following our coordination meetings, members of Alsakuy Agroecológica took part in the daily cooking in the community kitchens; this proved central for building trust and class solidarity. Sharing everyday work allowed us to understand organisational dynamics, political processes and the multiple challenges faced by women and their neighbourhoods.
From this point, a series of workshops were proposed as spaces for training, evaluation and collective organisation. This integrated all participants into the process as researchers of their own reality. The research was structured around five axes: Body-Territory; Agrifood Systems; Uses and Relationships with Water; Educational Methodologies; and Human Rights. Throughout the process, facilitators and participants assumed clear, collectively agreed and non-hierarchical roles, promoting mutual and emancipatory education.
Through mapping and embroidery, participants traced connections between memory, emotions and history
The workshops began by exploring the Body-Territory axis as a way of sensitively recognising individual and collective identity and its relationship with the territory. Through mapping and embroidery, participants traced connections between memory, emotions and history in the construction of the neighbourhood, identifying vulnerable, shared, healing and safe spaces. This enabled a critical understanding of how experiences intersect in women’s lives – from migration processes to the physical and emotional impacts of sustaining the kitchens – while also highlighting solidarity and the kitchen as a safe space of encounter.
The second axis, Agrifood Systems, involved collectively analysing the origin of food, reflecting on what the State provides and what can be accessed through self-management. This led to envisioning more autonomous, dignified and healthy alternatives – such as community gardens – alongside technical-political workshops to share ancestral agricultural knowledge and strengthen organisation.
The third axis, Uses and Relationships with Water, revealed deep inequalities in access to basic services between the kitchens. While the Leoncio Prado location has access, Las Delicias faces serious health and food challenges due to lack or poor quality of water. This led to collective actions aimed at securing the right to water and highlighted how unequal water access reflects broader territorial and political hierarchies.
The fourth axis, Educational methodologies, emphasised the importance of articulation among kitchens to advance collective demands and build autonomy. This gave rise to a training-of-trainers process that now links eight community kitchens in the micro-watershed.
The final axis, Human Rights, ran throughout the process, incorporating legal frameworks to understand rights and how to claim them in pursuit of a dignified life.
Throughout the process, we came to understand in practice that knowledge building begins from popular and traditional knowledge, advancing through continuous cycles that integrate reflection and action, where each iteration deepens learning. In this way, we return to the idea that knowledge is elevated through transformative practice, in a constant movement between action and reflection. Likewise, placing emotions at the centre of the learning process allowed for a deeper and more meaningful appropriation of the content, recognising its political and subjective dimensions.
Lessons, tensions and challenges
For Alsakuy Agroecológica, as a migrant youth organisation, the understanding that life is organised around the communal in the Andean world was crucial to the process. Families do not exist separately, but within relationships of reciprocity such as ayni. Agriculture is a form of co-nurturing between people, seeds, soils and other forms of life: we not only nurture but are also nurtured by the territories we inhabit. These relationships sustain Allin Kawsay or buen vivir.
In urban and peri-urban contexts, although patriarchal and capitalist logics erode the relationship with the land and commodify food, these principles do not disappear but are transformed. As organised youth, we seek to strengthen these continuities, understanding that care remains the basis of the production and reproduction of life.
Three shared horizons emerge: strengthening food sovereignty, recovering community ties and dignifying life
The members of the community kitchens sustain multiple forms of work under conditions of high precariousness. From our role as a youth organisation with an articulating function, we identify material difficulties and tensions inherent to organisational processes: emotional exhaustion, uneven participation and difficulties in sustaining commitments. These tensions do not weaken the process but rather have required us to constantly adapt our methodologies in order to sustain collective commitment.
From this path, three shared horizons emerge: strengthening food sovereignty, recovering community ties and dignifying life. These are expressed in agroecological gardens and the articulation of the kitchens; in the reactivation of community practices such as yunza, linked to harvest celebrations; and in advances towards better living conditions, such as alternative education spaces and the struggle for fair access to water.
Finally, from an intergenerational perspective, we understand that agroecological transformation is not only productive, but also a process of healing and of rebuilding relationships with the land, food and community. As a youth organisation, we take on this process as an open one: rather than closing with definitive answers, we seek to sustain questions that continue to be cooked in the pot, in the neighbourhood, and in everyday life.
Authors: Mel Becerra Lavado (30) is a popular educator and researcher with experience in educational work with women and children, and works with Alsakuy Agroecológica. Paul Hospinal Román (30) works with Alsakuy Agroecológica and is a popular educator dedicated to agroecology. Nori Verina Díaz Espinoza (35) works with Alsakuy Agroecológica and is a popular educator and researcher committed to agroecology as a political, epistemological and territorial project. Email: alsakuy.agroecologica@gmail.com
This article is part of Issue 4-2026: Youth leading the way in agroecology.
